Early call centers were structured around handling voice calls that may have been inbound, outbound, or combination of both. While voice calls are a common way of engaging customers, modern call centers now handle many other types of communication channels. For instance, many call centers can support other various channels such as email, texts (short messaging service (“SMS”), multimedia messaging service (“MMS”)), video chat, social media, fax, and web-based chat. Accordingly, many call centers managing these additional channels have become to be referred to as “contact centers” to reflect that they support many different modes of engaging customers, as opposed to only handling voice calls. Thus, today a party may engage in an interaction with a contact center using any one of a number of different channels of communication.
However, once a party and an agent at a contact center begin to interact over a particular channel of communication, circumstances may change so that the party may no longer be able to continue to interact with the agent although the party and agent are not finished with the interaction. For example, a party may be involved in a Web chat on his home PC with an agent about a certain product being advertised on a web site and may need to leave for work although the party is not finished chatting with the agent. Normally, the party would have no option but to end the chat and contact the center at a later time via a new chat or through some other channel of communication to continue the discussion on the product. In this instance, the party is not likely to be connected with the same agent he was conversing with before on the chat and the party may then have to spend time with the new agent explaining his previous chat with the first agent in order to bring the new agent up to speed so that the party and new agent can continue the conversation on the product. Accordingly, this can be quite frustrating for the party since the party has to spend time rehashing over what has already been discussed in the previous chat.
Therefore, a need in the art exists that would allow for a party engaged in an interaction with a contact center to be able to transfer the interaction from a first channel of communication to a second channel of communication. For example, a party engaged in a voice call with an agent of a contact center may wish to end the voice call but continue the engagement with the agent via text messaging. In this instance, it would be helpful if the agent were able to end the voice call with the party and then initiate text messaging with the party to continue the engagement. In addition, it would be helpful in many instances if the multiple communication channels being used by the agent to engage the party could be “linked” so that the contact center is aware that the agent is engaging with a single party by using the multiple channels of communication. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.